Public anxiety about government spending is becoming noticeable. Or at least, the White House has finally noticed. They are directing governmental agencies to develop plans for trimming a whole 5 percent from their budgets by identifying programs which “do not advance their missions or President Obama’s agenda.”

Peter Orzag and Rahm Emanuel are sending a memo to federal agencies, asking them to find spending cuts. The memo says, gracefully, according to the Washington Post:

“The American people deserve a government that spends every taxpayer dollar with as much care as taxpayers spend their own dollars — where money is spent not out of inertia, but only when it contributes to achieving a clear national priority,” Emanuel and Orszag write in the memo, according to an early draft.

Oh my. Read that one again. This is the government that spent $862 billion in a stimulus bill that did not stimulate, on Keynesian multipliers that didn’t multiply, on shovel-ready projects that weren’t shovel ready, and on projects that resulted in new jobs only by the mysteries of double and triple counting of imaginary people. “Spends taxpayer dollars with as much care,” oh my.

To encourage cooperation, Obama also will ask Congress for new authority to let agencies keep half the savings they identify, administration officials said. The agencies could then put the cash toward higher priorities rather than surrendering it all for deficit reduction, as is typical.

Basically, it’s as if I tell my bank “I am massively in the red, I know, and from now on I will be reasonable. See, my plan is to cut $5.00 out of the $100 I spend per week. $2.50 will go to reducing my $300,000 deficit and $2.50 I will spend on more stuff. I need a little incentive after all my efforts.”

This is absurd, a joke. Congress is attempting to pass a “jobs bill” or stimulus 3.0. It won’t create any jobs either. Then they want to ram through a cap-and-trade bill, and just before the election they want to send out another check for the seniors who always vote, and seem to be well represented at the Tea Party rallies — at least if the grey hair in the crowds is accurate. Of course you can never tell with those violent tea-party activists. “Clear national priority indeed!”

This is a feel-good pretend effort to sway the masses, whom they think are too dumb to grasp the complicated details of budget trimming. The very painful exercise that millions of families are having to go through at the kitchen table as a result of President Obama’s agenda.

Remember way back when the War in Iraq began, and the media discovered that the company providing meals and laundry and putting up camps in Iraq was (gasp) Halliburton, and you know Dick Cheney used to be CEO of Halliburton and undue influence, crony capitalism, blah, blah, blah. The media desperately tried to find something untoward., but Mr. Cheney had severed his relations with the company which had a new CEO, and it was all a pack of nonsense.

So in the normal course of politics, each side keeps an eye on the other side for crony capitalism, favoritism, bribes and payoffs. It’s the way it is supposed to be, except the media is supposed to be an objective watchdog, which they have forgotten how to do.

The connections between the Obama administration and the unions seems to involve a number of those sins, and sooner or later, someone will write a book about the relationship. In the meantime, we have an interesting case of for-profit politics:

The Obama administration appointee who would run a proposed subsidy program dubbed “Cash for Caulkers” has intimate ties to a company that has lobbied for the bill and would profit from it.

Al Gore acolyte Cathy Zoi, the Energy Department official in charge of energy efficiency, has testified in favor of the caulkers bill, which the House passed last week. She would administer it if it became law and is married to an executive at a window company that has pushed for this legislation.

We have written before about Ms. Zoi’s troublesome potential to profit substantially from the activities she is supposed to administer.

The Chamber of Commerce — the embodiment of anti-government greed in Obama’s standard rhetoric — is lobbying hard for the bill, and has informed members of Congress that this will be one of the votes tallied on the chamber’s annual scorecard of lawmakers. Also working Congress in support of the measure are the National Association of Manufacturers, Dow Chemical, the Laborers’ International Union of North America, the contracting industry and the window industry.

With all these supporters, Obama and the credulous media will declare it’s a consensus, and so it must be good. But really, the bill just spreads the corporate welfare strategically. It’s corporate welfare because the companies that sell the windows, insulation and services the bill subsidizes can now raise their prices, because consumers’ price tolerance goes up. So the subsidy is split between the companies and the homeowner. Americans without savings or equity with which to afford new windows are out of luck, as are renters. But they still foot the bill.

Well. Conflict of interest. Corporate Welfare. Crony capitalism. As Timothy Carney says, “when government injects itself more deeply into the economy, opportunities for cronyism come with the territory.” It is still deeply unseemly. Ms. Zoi should go, or the program should go, preferably the latter. What a dishonest scam.

Someone in some back room of the progressive political establishment thought that accusing the Tea Party movement of being racist, homophobic, and so on, and so on, all the usual smears, would be successful in demolishing the movement. Amid reports and videos of peaceful gatherings of people who were having a good time protesting, the accusations just weren’t working. So they sent infiltrators with racist, homophobic, Nazi, and Klan signs to join the crowd and wave their signs whenever they saw a camera. That’s not working either.

It is becoming obvious that liberals just don’t tolerate disagreement. They are unprepared for honest debate, unprepared to consider the merits of other opinions, and in general just want the opposition to shut up. What an odd turn of events, when liberals control the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. The men who created the Constitution expected and wanted vigorous debate, and that has been our tradition. One must conclude that liberals are unprepared to honestly defend their ideas. Or defend their spending.

The Health Care Summit is tomorrow, Thursday. President Obama has set up the usual straw men, (some say), (there seems to be a set of people), (there are those who), and shot them down with the usual broad rhetorical flourishes. What exactly he hopes to accomplish with this summit remains unclear. It is clearly not any bipartisan anything. It seems to be a little theater to say my way or the highway.

This is the essence of Obama: filled with grand plans and a grandiose conception of himself, but short on workable plans, legislative prowess, and strategic thinking. And underneath it all is a deep contempt for the wishes and concerns of average Americans.

Americans have taken every opportunity — the town hall revolt, increasingly lopsided polling, a series of upset elections culminating in Massachusetts — to shout their second thoughts. At this point, for Democratic leaders to insist on their current approach is to insist that Americans are not only misinformed but also dimwitted. And the proposed form of this insistence — enacting health reform through the quick, dirty shove of the reconciliation process — would add coercion to arrogance.

Here are the most recent public opinion polls on support/opposition for the health care bill, according to assorted pollsters. (From Jim Geraghty)

With all the talk about “ramming it through,” “reconciliation,” President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid are telling the American people that they are uninterested in their opinions, and just shut up.

That’s the question asked on the Heritage Foundation’s blog. The Senate health-care bill got the unions on board by exempting union workers from the proposed 40-percent excise tax on “Cadillac” plans — those worth more than $8,000 a year for individuals.

It is not yet clear what the White House’s new strategy to pass health care will be in the wake of Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts senate race. Democrats, from their public utterances, are dismissing it as angry white men, angry stupid people, and badly misled people who don’t know what’s good for them. The very definition of denial. What they say in private remains unknown.

But according to Federal News Radio, can’t have federal employees left out of the earlier compromise. Just to make sure that the definition of a “Cadillac” plan for federal employees is fair, dental and vision insurance would not be counted towards the taxable cost of a policy. This, of course, includes Members of Congress who blithely exempt themselves from anything unpleasant.

This is such stupid public policy that it boggles the mind. They probably think we won’t notice. They really do think we’re stupid, you know.

The Supreme Court handed down a major decision in Citizens United v. FEC, the “Hillary: The Movie” case that was first argued last March, reargued in September, and finally decided last Thursday, January 21, 2010.

Background: During the 2008 election campaign, the nonprofit group Citizens United wanted to make a film available on cable-on-demand that was critical of then-candidate Hillary Clinton. Because Citizens United is organized as a corporation, under the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, its speech was banned. The movie was not allowed to be shown, and the law was backed by criminal sanctions. Section 441b makes it a felony for all corporations — including nonprofit advocacy corporations — either to expressly advocate the election or defeat of candidates or to broadcast electioneering communications within 30 days of a primary and 60 days of a general election.

Citizens United challenged this ban, and the Supreme Court struck down this provision of McCain-Feingold , reversing a previous ruling — Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce —that permitted the government to ban corporations and labor unions from promoting or opposing political candidates.

Paul Sherman, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, which litigates free-speech cases nationwide points out:

The ruling in Citizens United is a straightforward application of basic First Amendment principles: “When Government seeks to use its full power…to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”

The Democrats are OUTRAGED: Corporations are not entitled to free speech, political expenditures are not “speech”, protections of the Free Speech Clause properly apply to individuals not corporations, this will corrupt the democratic process, will radically increase powerful corporate influence in politics, blah, blah, blah. Democrats are afraid that corporations benefit Republicans, and free speech should not apply to anyone who might be critical of Democrats.

The First Amendment is about political speech, and if free speech only applies to speech that is pleasing to you, then it isn’t free, and it isn’t freedom — but tyranny. You might find it interesting to keep track of the numerous and constant efforts of the Democrats to stifle speech that they don’t like. For example, President Obama’s ban on Fox News continues.

Just watch. There will be a concerted effort on the part of the Democrats to overturn or overrule this decision. The “Democrats” aren’t much on Democracy, the Constitution (needs updating for modern times), especially the First Amendment — although that religion part is useful for getting rid of religious influences. They’re fairly fond of the “establishment” bit but always, always, ignore the — making no law that might “prohibit the free exercise thereof” part.

Progressives are passionately fond of larger government, the growth of government, and the exercise of lots of government power. The Constitution puts some firm limits on what government can and cannot do. They don’t like that.